bitcoin.stackexchange.com Archives - 06 March 2013, Wednesday

There are several major differences. Bitcoin is a currency with a built in payment system for its currency. Ripple is a payment system for arbitrary currencies with support for cross-currency transactions. One big difference is that currencies in Ripple are represented as debts (IOUs)...

I like bitcoin in the sense that it decentralizes currency. I would like to know though if it is a commodity-backed currency similar to the gold standard decades ago? Is it possible in the near future? As it is it seems that it is the same fiat money, except that it isn't the Fed issu...

It really depends on how much you're willing to spend. Low end Let's talk about the very smallest investment you could make for mining bitcoins: a Raspberry Pi. It can do 200,000 hashes per second, which might sound like a lot, but actually it's about 0.000001% of the total network ha...

A pre-defined schedule limits the total number of bitcoins so that they gradually approach a total of 21 million (ignoring those that have been lost through deleted or misplaced wallet files). The limit of 21 million bitcoins is "hard-wired" in to the protocol , and there will never b...

I've been reading around: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_bitcoin_works What prevents a miner's block from being accepted across the network if the hash checks out when miner forges transactions in the block? For example, lets say I'm mining and I want to steal money from address A and...

Have any cryptography experts vetted the bitcoin source code? How do I build Bitcoin from source in Linux? Why do I get `bitcoind: command not found` in Ubuntu? Why are coin miners (such as GUIMiner) a “threat” in Windows Defender? How do I build Bitcoin source in Windows 7? What does...

Assume, we create an alternative cryptocurrency ("InflationCoin") based on the bitcoin software with one change to the protocol: The Block reward is constant, e.g. 50 InflationCoin Technically this would work just like Bitcoin while avoiding one of Bitcoin's most discussed characteris...

Buying Bitcoin Through Google Checkout : Unsurprisingly, [neither] Apple nor Google will ever allow for digital currencies to be exchanged through their systems as a part of their TOS. btcnow.net used to, but apparently Google put the kibosh on that some time ago. fireduck asked in th...

If a node (V) accepts incoming connections is he vulnerable to becoming completely surrounded by corrupted nodes? Would this attacker then be able to control which transactions are relayed to V and which transactions V is able to broadcast to the network? I assume for this to happen V...

I have several Yubikeys and would like to use one or more with MtGox.... however it seems that I can only use keys purchased from Mt Gox on their site. Why did Mt Gox choose to implement security this way? Suppose I'm creating my own secure website based on Yubikey.. what are the cond...

Not without an intermediary. Banks deal with traditional currencies like Euros or US Dollars, whereas Bitcoin is completely based on transactions involving bitcoins. The only reason bitcoins have a value denominated in USD or Euros is that there are people willing to buy them for that...

Investing in expensive mining equipment hedges a bet that the return on investment, in the form of Bitcoin, will eventually pay off the initial investment and continue paying a return for some time before becoming obsolete (like CPU mining has and GPU mining shortly will) or breaking ...

With the rumors of the Bitinstant credit card failing to deliver, and the only other one out there being a fake scam site, does anyone out there offer a solution to this? Just the ability to pay with Bitcoin wherever credit cards are accepted in USD is all I need.

Decentralized escrow functionality built into Bitcoin? Is there data on the geographic distribution of bitcoin users? How can the alert system be triggered? Who can do it? Who controls the Bitcoin software? Who controls Solidcoin's special millionaire accounts? When and who coined the...

No. A transaction is composed of a sequence of inputs and outputs in a specific order. This data structure is hashed and makes its way to the Merkle root and block header, and thus if the transaction were to change, all the blocks that follow would be invalidated. It's possible that a...

What are the logical conditions that would require me to change a sequence number? Suppose there is this transaction txid: abcdefghi... sequence:1 input:1someVanityName output:1otherVanityName ... ... and the people who mutually created this TX decide to revise some information. Perha...

What are the specific parts of a transaction(s) that need to be signed in the "inheritance scripting sample ". Specifically, can someone provide more detail on what exactly is signed of the transactions? I'm assuming there are approximately 3 transactions, but unsure of what is signed...

Related:

my question is about the difference between compressed keys and addresses, and i know it was addressed in another question but my question is less about the theory and more about how the keys are used practically in bitcoin. so heres what i did: i used dumpprivkey for an address (183T...

Well after getting a new graphics card (7770) I can mine bitcoins at around 180-120Mhash/s Depending if I run it at full power or not. Now I thought I would try and mine myself an address using it but the miner just seems to not work. Using Vanitygen (Linked below) oclvanitygen I set ...

If service1 trusts service0's green address implicitly, it can send the coins immediately; there is no advantage to waiting. The recipient can then decides how many blocks to wait for before treating the payment as confirmed. If service0's green address isn't trusted, service1 needs t...

There are many causes for inflation, but the two most often agreed upon, according to Investopedia , are these: Demand-Pull Inflation - This theory can be summarized as "too much money chasing too few goods". In other words, if demand is growing faster than supply, prices will increas...

Generally speaking if you want to contribute you have two options: Become a blockchain peer The Bitcoin network requires the full chain to be available for download. If not enough peers allow the full chain to be downloaded, this is a risk to the network. This isn't CPU intensive but ...

Because bitcoin is a pseudonymous digital currency, there are no hard statistics available. Because one popular service, SatoshiDICE, uses static Bitcoin addresses as the wagering mechanism for the players of its online "Dice" game, the amount of activity related to them can be measur...

I am trying to study the locktime feature of transactions ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification#tx ). I have created some raw transactions in the testnet with different locktimes, but, when I send them, they are confirmed as usual. I have also been able to spend the just...

I'm interested in seeing the schema (layout and indexes) that is used in the reference client. Namely wallet.dat, the bk** files and also the in-memory uncommitted tx. Does this exist anywhere for the 7.x client or the newer BerkleyDB format? I'd like to see what, if any changes are b...

http://www.mediafire.com/?l8i99fbyn41n97a I have an i7 getting 40 k/Hash which is not too bad Considering that with cgminer config correctly you will get an k/Hash result similar to the M/Hash result for your GPU mining activities Check this out for an complete guide of what your outp...

The problem was that in case a duplicate transaction was created in a side-chain that is afterwards reverted, and is only seen by a certain portion of the network, a fork risk exists. The nodes A that have seen the duplicate transactions and its reversal, will consider the original tr...

Is there a solid “Bitcoin Bank” yet? What would a country adopting Bitcoins as official currency have to reinvent? Are there any bitcoin banks (online services) and what are the benefits and pitfalls of using them? How can one download the bitcoin client securely? How would interest a...

Put up an ad on LocalBitcoins.com . You possibly might find a tourist arriving with bitcoins who is looking for Argentine pesos. Or perhaps you'll find a local Bitcoin miner who is simply looking to cash out some bitcoins for your pesos. Are there any goods that you could pay for with...